‘Dear Mr Darwin’: What can we learn from 19th Century Citizen Science?

Professor Sally Shuttleworth, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Dr Sally Frampton, Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, and Dr Geoff Belknap, Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Leicester will talk at the Oxford Martin School about the role of Citizen Science in their AHRC Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries project.

The project uses the framing of ‘Citizen Science’ to consider how ‘public’ participation in science was understood in the nineteenth century. The project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with contemporary scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice.